Not The Usual Spiel
by Malteaser
Summary: It's Purim time! Alice is baking, Hatter wants his apartment back, and Carol is beginning to miss having her daughter at home.


The phone rang five times before anyone picked up.

"Hello?" Hatter said.

"Hi, it's me," Carol replied. "Is Alice there?"

"She most certainly is, and I'll hand you over to her in a moment, but I need you to answer a question for me first."

"Okay?" Carol said, curious.

"Does Alice normally bake this much for Purim?" Hatter asked. There was a shout that Carol would bet good money on being Alice's.

"I don't know," Carol told him, smiling. "How much baking are we talking about?"

"Enough that I've been home for ten minutes and haven't been able to move from just in front of the door," Hatter said with a tone of mock annoyance. "Where there aren't baked goods, there's tissue paper, or sweets, or trail mixes, or baskets. There's literally no room in the apartment!"

"You're exaggerating!" Alice yelled, just barely comprehensible.

"I am not!" Hatter retorted, sounding mortally offended.

"I hate to agree with you over my own daughter," Carol said. "But you probably aren't."

"There see, your mother agrees with me," Hatter hollered, making Carol wince. Oblivious to the damage he'd just dealt her eardrums, Hatter's voice returned to normal as he asked. "Wait. Does this mean that she's going to fill the entire apartment with- Oi! Give me my hat back!"

Alice said something Carol couldn't quite make out.

"Well, I had to get you to clear a way to my dinner, didn't I? I've got to go back to the shop in three-quarters of an hour, and I'm fairly sure I'm not allowed to eat your ear pastries."

Alice said something again, and Carol cough loudly into the phone in the hopes that Hatter might remember that she was still on the line.

"Oh. Really?" He paused for a moment. "Okay, Carol, I'm giving you over to Alice now."

Alice was sniggering slightly when she got the phone. "Hey Mom, what's up?"

"Well, I was going to ask if you wanted to deliver shalach manos for me on Sunday, but you seem to have your hands full," Carol said wryly.

"Not so much," Alice said. "It's the usual suspects, plus three families in the building who may or may not send over baskets, Hatter's employees, Hatter's friends, and Benjamin Levy." There was a moment as Alice reviewed what she had said. "Okay, so, there might be twice as many people this year as there was last year. But I can manage!"

"Who's that?" Carol asked, at the same time Hatter said "I pay my employees, you don't need to feed them."

"That's not the point, and you know it," Alice said. Her voice sounded muffled; she knew, at least, to cover the phone with her hand when yelling at her significant other. "Sorry Mom. What was that?"

"I said who's Benjamin Levy?"

"An acquaintance of ours," Alice replied. "He owns a thrift shop Hatter once accidentally knocked half the clothing racks over in."

"And now you're exchanging Purim baskets?" Carol said, not exactly disbelieving so much as unsure as to whether or not she wanted to know how Hatter had pulled that one off.

"He didn't know it was possible for them to fall over like dominos in real life," Alice explained. "Hatter offered to show him again once he'd managed to clean everything up, and one _very_ long conversation about shop layouts later, he was being invited to drop by and visit anytime."

Hatter said something unintelligible that made Alice laugh.

"What was that?" Carol asked.

"Nothing," Alice said. "Anyway, the point is I can deliver your baskets for you." She waited a beat, and then added. "I'm going to make Hatter get up early and deliver my baskets for me."

"Oi!" Hatter cried.

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding," Alice replied. "I can do both. I have the whole of March 20th off from work."

"But are you sure one day will be enough time?" Carol teased. "If you've got enough to fill the apartment I'm not sure there are enough daylight hours for you to finish."

"Don't worry, once I actually get everything into the baskets they'll only take up half the apartment," Alice replied. "I'll stop by your place sometime in the afternoon, then?"

Your place. Not our place, not home, but your place. Alice and Hatter had been living together for nearly a year now, true, but somehow the fact still took her by surprise."Yeah. I'll see you then, Alice."

"Bye, Mom!" Alice said, and hung up, blissfully unaware of how tight Carol's throat had suddenly gone.

Carol put the phone back down with a deep breath. It echoed slightly in the open emptiness of the apartment. It had been perfect, back when Alice was an active, growing child; now she was grown, and not a child and it was suddenly all too _big_.

She wasn't going to sell it yet, not in this market; and for all that she felt slightly guilty about it, she felt the need to keep Alice's room available until she was at least properly engaged. It wasn't that she didn't trust her daughter's judgment, and it wasn't that she wasn't fond of Hatter. It _was_ that they both dodged questions about their meeting and his upbringing with coordinated ease, and she didn't like that they felt the need to hide something from her.

That was a conversation for another day, though, when she had something concrete to confront them with, and didn't have food to make. Alice might have been in charge of all things baked and frosted since her grandparents had sent her an Easy-Bake oven, but Carol was fairly confident that she could whip up some hamantaschen to rival her daughter's.

She'd been the one to teach her how, after all.

**A/N: Two of my personal canons for a while have been that Alice is Jewish and Alice loves to bake. And so, this fic was kind of inevitable. **


End file.
